Notorious snatcher with 180 cases against him held in outer Delhi

Ajay alias Gainda was arrested on September 4 along with his accomplice from Sultanpur in outer Delhi. A police team recovered a country-made pistol, 23 psychotropic injections and other narcotic substances from the duo, officials said.

Delhi Police have arrested a 35-year-old man considered to be one of the most notorious snatchers in the city due to his involvement in around 180 criminal cases, officials said on Tuesday.

Notorious snatcher with 180 cases against him held in outer Delhi

Ajay alias Gainda was arrested on September 4 along with his accomplice Deepak alias Santosh, 30, from Sultanpur in outer Delhi. A police team from the Raj Park police station recovered a country-made pistol, 23 psychotropic injections and other narcotic substances from the duo, officials said.

With their arrest, police said they have solved a dozen crimes registered at the Raj Park, Paschim Vihar, Mangolpuri and Rani Bagh police stations over the past few months.

Multiple teams of the Delhi Police and the police of other neighbouring states on the lookout for Gainda but as he never kept a mobile phone and frequently changed his hideouts, police were finding it difficult to track him down, officials said.

Additional deputy commissioner of police (outer) Amit Verma said that over the last few weeks, the Raj Park police station team had been working on clues about Gainda and his arrival in Delhi. On September 4, the team received information that Gainda would be passing through Mangolpuri in a white car along with his associates. Accordingly, a trap was laid in Sultanpur. Around 5 pm, the team spotted the white car and signalled its driver to stop.

“The car driver tried to flee and in the process hit some police staff. However, the raiding team surrounded and blocked the vehicle and overpowered the occupants of the car. They were identified as Ajay alias Gainda aka Vicky and his associate Deepak alias Santosh. Their personal search led to the recovery of 23 psychotropic injections and one loaded country-made pistol. We are interrogating them to ascertain why they were carrying the injections and how they procured them,” said Verma.

Gainda was last arrested in August 2019 by the west district police, and at that time, police had said he was involved in 60 cases. When he was arrested on September 4, police said he was involved in around 180 cases. Although the outer district police did not provide the date when Gainda was released from jail, their claim about his involvement in 180 cases means he committed nearly 120 crimes over the last three years.

A resident of Mangolpuri, Gainda took to crime around 20 years ago and has been involved in robberies, burglaries and snatching. A senior police official said he was also slapped under the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, 1999 (MCOCA) in the past.

According to police, Gainda is the brother of Delhi’s top snatcher Rajesh alias Dil Dil, and they together were involved in over 300 crimes in the Delhi- NCR region. Dil Dil was last arrested in December 2021 after evading police for more than two years.

Over the last few years, police officials said, Gainda only snatched gold chains, which were then passed on to his relatives in Uttar Pradesh and sold at local jewellery shops.